So you are looking for an easy solution to your web hosting, yet are not finding it so easy when it comes to choosing between the many web hosting offers on the market. This is hardly surprising, considering overwhelming number of “review sites” that come up when you search for the “best web host” on Google.

This is certainly a testament to how quickly the web hosting industry has grown in the short space of time. It is also a hallmark of just how much money there is to be made in a cut-throat web hosting industry.

It would be naive to believe that none of these web hosting companies in the review sites are listed there without a little “greasing of the palms” and while this is “business as usual”, these review sites should be viewed with a healthy degree of scepticism.

So how do you find the best web hosting company for real? Nominating a “best” web hosting service on the internet is of course impossible. As one person’s needs vary from the next, some web hosting companies have areas in which they excel or are weak.

When it comes to choosing a host… and this is a step that most people skip. You need to first address your end goals and then look for a hosting company that fits in with them.

You can determine your needs by first answering the following questions:

1. What is the Objective of your Website?
2. Do you intend to make money from your site?
3. Is your site small or large scale?
4. Do you have any technology requirements?
5. What are your traffic goals?

I’ll address each on of these in turn in a minute, but first let’s look at the process for getting a website out there. What you need to understand is where choosing a host fits into the overall work-flow of taking a website from concept to fruition.

Come Up With Your Idea

This is where the journey starts, one day you are in the shower or driving your car or wherever and you get a sudden blinding insight, a flash of inspiration!

This is not one of your regular ideas either… This one’s “the one”. The one you actually do something about and so embarks your journey onto the information superhighway.

Write It Down On Paper

Sadly an oft-neglected step by eager web site creators who just want to get started building right away.

Ironically, and what they fail to see is that they don’t really know what their idea IS yet.

The result is often a crappy job or a heap of rework costing time and money. Another internet failure to be cast into the bowels of Google.

While there is no guarantee of this, the chances of a crappy outcome can be averted by writing your ideas down on paper.

While in the beginning of a fresh new project, it is only natural to be thinking your cool idea will be the “next big thing”, it is usually more productive to think in baby steps.

You will probably hate thinking about baby steps, but trust me, it is quite easy to bite off way more than you can chew and the result rarely worth it!

It is far better to start off with a smaller goal in mind which can be tested and pursued later if the idea still looks promising.

Anyway, about paper.. just writing your idea down on paper makes the concept much clearer in your mind. Draw a few mock-up screens of your envisaged site. Put a few flow-charts together. Consider usability factors.

Consider many different angles and then ask yourself:

Does my idea still make sense when I look at it this way?

If you get your idea thoroughly fleshed out on paper, you will  be much more aware of potential problems with the design. And it’s FAR cheaper to address issues them at this stage than it is when your site is already half way built!

Always keep one thing in mind.

IT’S FAR CHEAPER TO FIX YOUR PROBLEMS “UPSTREAM” THAN “DOWNSTREAM”

The cost of fixing a design flaw is 10’s if not 1000’s of times cheaper when it’s scribbled down on a piece of paper, than later on.

So do yourself a favour and get your idea down on paper before you embark on doing any serious work.

This goes TRIPLE on large scale projects!

Craft Your Unique Selling Position (USP)?

You probably know by now what your website is about. You do right?

What is more important than what you’re about is how you are going to market the thing.

If you don’t have a clue then stop everything you’re doing and go and do this…

Now!

Whether we like it or not the internet has become a vastly competitive arena.

To stand out it is crucial to have an angle. While not so important if you’re just forging your own personal space on the net, I’m assuming you’re set on building a serious site, or you wouldn’t have read this far.

If you want anyone to know your site even exists, you have to find a way of attracting visitors. This usually requires either a unique concept or unique content within an existing concept plus a certain amount of marketing effort.

If your website is on a single topic then you might get lucky and choose a topic that people search on and has absolutely no competition. On the other hand if your website theme is in an established area, then another “me too” website probably won’t cut it!

When planning your website, it is worth doing at least some basic market and keyword research.  This is a topic I might cover in another article, but in the mean time I highly recommend checking out Court’s free Keyword Crash Course.

The course focuses on making money on the internet and while making money may not be your goal, you still need to find a way to attract visitors to your website. The Keyword crash course covers tried and proven methods for researching a niche, targeting good keywords and SEO techniques to increase your capacity to bring in visitors.

Register A Domain Name

Your domain name uniquely identifies your website on the internet from the billions of others out there. It’s like a phone number, but instead of a string of digits it’s forms ia http://www.thedomain.com.

A domain name will only cost you about $10 USD and can be picked up from a domain name registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap. When choosing your domain, it should include, or be closely related to your Unique Selling Position or main keyword.

If your USP is “Cheap Home Loans” then your domain should be www.cheaphomeloans.com or www.homeloanscheap.com or something along those lines.

Chances are if your USP is not very specific then your domain name will be already taken. One solution is to check for the availability of a domain with keywords separated by dashes i.e. www.cheap-home-loans.com, but should be avoided if possible as people typing your URL directly in your web browser generally don’t think in terms of dashes and will type the non-dashed domain instead.

Find a Web Host

Notice that finding a web host is something you do way down in the process and not until you have brainstormed your idea, fleshed it out on paper, crafted a unique selling position and registered a domain.

Yet I’m willing to bet most people rush out and look for a web hosting solution, first!

The fact is, even after registering a domain name might be too early, as you can hold off on finding a host even longer, by building offline using a tool like XAMPP, which simulates a web hosting server on your PC, saving you paying hosting fees until your project is ready to go live.

Finding a web host is an important step, but it is a step in the process that comes near the end, not the beginning.

Build It

I won’t go into the intricacies of how to design a website. But at the very least you should have a website wireframe.

You should know what required pages your site will have and whether the site will have a blog, forum, articles, a mailing list, sitemap, etc, *BEFORE* you start constructing your site.

Actually building the website itself is not actually that tricky, but you will have to know a little HTML, or be prepared to spend a little money to outsource the work. A website can be outsourced at places like 99Designs.com or Elance.com.

Publish It

Once you have created the web pages and initial content for your site, it is time to make your site live.

Depending on how much work you did offline, your site will either be relatively complete, or a skeleton that you can add to later.

Making a site live involves transferring your offline project files to your online web hosting server. How to accomplish this is a topic for another article. What it comes down to is setting up some space on your server and using an FTP client like CuteFTP to transfer your files.

Once your website has gone live you will want to get some user feedback to determine if your website is functioning as it should and meets your goals.

Test It

Now that your site is live, it is time to test it out on real traffic and real people. When you first launch your site, you will probably not have very many visitors, so you should tell your friends and/or colleagues to visit the site and give you feedback.

If you want feedback from your visitors, consider setting up surveys on your website pages. Not every visitor will want to voluntarily fill in your questionnaires. Offering free stuff can encourage visitors to open up about their experiences on your site.

For immediate feedback, you can drive visitors to your website instantly using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, however this is not free. You will have to pay every time a visitor clicks on your ad, so it’s best you do this only for a small initial sample.

Incidentally this is a great method of testing mailing list signup pages, to see what sort of signup rate you get for X amount of visitors.

Optimize It

Once your website is ready for greater exposure, it is time to optimize for more incoming traffic.

Traffic can come from a variety of sources, but the most targeted usually comes from the search engines. Search engines are all about matching the most appropriate websites with the keywords people search so, so getting visitors to your site from search engines is about getting the right keywords ranked your site. Like “cheap home loans” in the case of a home loan niche site.

Generally the broader the keywords, the more competition there is for them, so targeting phrases like “home loans” will be harder to rank for than “first home buyers loan”. The second type of keyword is called a “long tail” keyword phrase because it has more words in it and people are less likely to search on that particular term. This also means there will be far less competition for this term and so much easier to achieve a higher rank.

The cheapest and easiest way to drive traffic to your website is to optimize your pages for long tail keywords and get them ranked high in the search engines. Search Engine traffic is called “Organic Traffic” and is unfortunately also the slowest way to gain visitors, as it can take time to achieve a high keyword ranking, especially if your market is a competitive one.

The fastest method is to pay for traffic using paid traffic like PPC. This is a good way of getting traffic if you are making enough money from each visitor to recuperate the cost you have to pay when they click on your ad. Unfortunately it is a good way of blowing a lot of money if you’re not.

Monetize It

The final step is optimizing your site to make money or gain newsletter subscribers or getting your visitors to do whatever it was you had in mind at the outset.

If making money selling things is your goal, then you can monetize with Google Adsense or another advertising networks, affiliate products and selling your own products directly or with a drop shipping service.

If list building is your goal, then you should be driving visitors to your signup form using a top notch mailing list service. Whatever the goal of your website, you should be testing to see how many of your visitors are taking your desired course of action. Whether that be clicking through to an ad, or signing up for a mailing list, joining in a forum discussion or whatever.

Ok, so in a nutshell, we have just covered the basic phases you take to put a website out there and get people to notice it.

For some websites not all of those steps will apply. I focused on a commercial website development project. If you goals are personal, social, or non-profit, then you probably don’t want much to do with PPC and monetization.

You will still need to constantly market your site to grow your traffic over time.

Questions to Ask Yourself At The Start of Your Project

Having considered the development phases of publishing a website, keeping the overall process in mind at all times will save you from getting bogged down in unproductive work, losing motivation and getting side-tracked.

By answering these important questions at the start of the project you can save yourself potential disaster “upstream”:

What is the purpose of your website?

Will your website be a personal blog, a social site, a news site, a wiki site, a corporate website for a business, an eCommerce site for purchasing goods?

The purpose of your website will help you determine a lot about what hosting requirements you have.

Do you intend to sell anything?

Is your website a sales page for your offline business, or are you going to be trying to make money from your visitors?

If you are thinking about making money, but are not yet sure how to, go about it, you will need to research your market to first ensure your niche has commercial potential.

You should then decide how you are going to monetize your website.

A great way of testing a niche is to build mini site using a free web platform like Hubpages, Squidoo, Blogger.com or Wordpress.org and optimize it for your keywords.

Drive a little traffic to your platform and see if your visitors are willing to buy from you.

Do you have any special technology requirements?

If your website is driven by technology other than the standard web services offered by the typical hosting provider, then you choice of host will be limited to the one that is prepared to work with your specific needs.

Small scale or large scale?

What is your website development budget? Are you starting with nothing, or are you sponsored by a company with thousands of dollars to spend?

What you can realistically achieve will depend on your budget, your skill level and how much time you have on your hand.

If you are building your website in your spare time, it is probably not wise to try and make the next Amazon.

If your project is larger or you are anticipating a massive amount of traffic and can pay a bit extra, it might be worth considering looking into a dedicated server with your host.

Do you have any particular web traffic goals in mind? If so what sort of numbers?

What are your traffic goals? Are you trying to build a small community, or do you want to dominate your area of expertise?

What is your strategy for driving traffic to your site?

How many visitors you can realistically expect is determined by how many people are searching on your target keyword phrases and how easily you can rank for them.

Easy Web Hosting Solutions: Ok, I made you wait this long. Here’s How To Choose A Web Hosting Company

Ok, so I have somehow managed to hold your attention this long

Now we get to the heart of the matter, choosing the right web hosting company.

Perhaps the easiest part of getting a site online is choosing a web hosting solution. Unfortunately the job is over-complicated by the amount of marketing hype and fake review sites!

When choosing a web hosting company there are a few key decisions you need to make. Let’s take a look at these.

Free Vs Paid hosting

If you are serious about building a website, you should in almost all cases choose a commercial hosting platform. The level of reliability, bandwidth and disk space you can expect from a commercial option far exceed what you can expect from a free service.

Saying this, free hosting platforms have their uses too. A free hosting platform might be an excellent choice for testing your website concept before investing more money, or if you intend your site to be a free information site.

But with a free hosting platform there are several restrictions you will have to account for:

Advertising On Free Web Hosting Sites

Most free web hosts impose advertising on your website to cover the cost of hosting your website for free.

The format of these differ, some will require you to show big ugly banners on each page, others display a window that pops up every time a page on your site loads. Others require you to display an Adsense frame on your sidebar.

Free Web Hosting Restricts Your Available Server Hard Drive Space

If you are creating a simple site then the amount of web space might not be too much of a concern, but if your site contains a large amount of images or video content, then you have to be careful your host will accommodate your needs.

Be wary of free sites if you think your disk space requirements might be a problem.

Free Web Hosts Can Restrict Certain File Types and File Sizes

Some free hosts impose a maximum size on each file you upload. Others restrict the type of file you can upload so that you can only upload HTML, GIF and JPG files, (or whatever).

All but the most basic of sites will require a lot more than this, so keep this in mind.

Consider Reliability and Access Speed Limitations With Free Hosting

A site that is frequently down will lose a lot of visitors. While in testing this is not such a big deal, but it becomes painful if it happens too frequently even in testing.

If you are sticking with a free hosting provider in the long term (not recommended) then visitors who find your website through the search engines are going to visit another website if your site is down and you have just lost a visitor!

Free Hosts Can Impose Restrictions On FTP Access

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Having multiple FTP accounts will allow you to give friends and employees their own FTP account. This will allow you to give them as little or as much access to your website as you choose.

Some free web hosting services do not permit FTP access and only allow you to design pages with their own builder. This is nice and simple for beginners, but if you are doing anything more advanced, you will want to edit your pages offline in a capable HTML editor and upload them to your web server with FTP.

Free Hosts Can Have Limited Scripting Languages Support

Perl and PHP are two popular scripting languages that allow custom website coding.

While it was once important to consider that your free web host supported any scripting languages you might need, there are now many free script hosting services available that provide counters, search engines, forms and mailing lists and so on, without requiring you to dabble with Perl or PHP scripts yourself.

If you are sure you require scripting support from your web host, you need to know the kinds of environments these scripts run under and what software versions they are running.

You also need to know what sort of access to particular features you have access to like the mail() function for php and sendmail() for Perl.

Many Free Hosts Limit Your Bandwidth Allocation

Many free web hosts impose a limit on the amount of traffic your website can use per day or per month, so if your pages are highly graphical and get loaded often by your visitors, you might quickly exceed your bandwidth allocation.

In general, 100MB traffic per month is far too small for anything other than a personal home page. 1-3GB of traffic per month is usually quite adequate, but your mileage will vary depending on the your site.

Considerations of a Commercial Hosting Solution

A commercial web hosting solution is recommended for all but the most minimal of sites.

When choosing a commercial host, many of the same considerations of a free host apply, but as you are paying, you naturally expect a much higher quality of service and support.

Reliability and speed of access – does a hosting company provide a refund if it falls bellow their threshold

If you are paying for a web hosting company, Not only do you expect the service to be both reliable and fast, they should GUARANTEE your uptime.

At a minimum you should have 99% uptime and the host should provide some sort of refund if it falls below that figure. If you find your web hosting company is providing you a lower level of reliability than this, then you should change hosts ASAP.

Be Wary of “Unlimited” Bandwidth Claims

We have talked about bandwidth allocation with free web hosting companies. With commercial web hosting companies, you can expect the bandwidth to be much higher.

Do not be unduly swayed by the promise of “unlimited” traffic. Almost all commercial websites will claim this as part of their marketing pitch. What you should know is that there is really no such thing!

If you expect your website to be a high traffic one, then pay close attention to your host’s policy statements. Usually you will find that they redefine “unlimited” to be limited in some form or another.

Bandwidth should not be a problem in most cases. A typical website will have less than 3GB of traffic per month.

Be Wary of “Unlimited” Disk Space Claims

Like bandwidth, disk space is commonly advertised as “unlimited” which it’s not. You probably only need to be concerned if you are hosting images or videos or any content that requires a lot of large files be stored on the server.

If your webpage is “normal”, then you can probably get by with only a few 100MB. If your needs are greater, read the policy statement.

Technical Support Should be Available 24/7

Your web hosts’ technical support should function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year round. Do not accept a host that will not have staff working on weekends or public holidays.

Consider Murphy’s law. If something is to go wrong, it usually will and at the worst possible time. This usually means your server will crash on weekends and public holidays.

Often a host will advertise 24/7 support, yet won’t really deliver on their promise. To find out if they do, test them out by contacting them at midnight or on weekends or public holidays. If you have to wait a few hours (or a few days) then the signs aren’t promising.

Website Scripts and Services

Your web hosting company should provide a large suite of services and other goodies. Most are standard fare, but some hosting companies provide extras that can be handy.

At the very least a commercial web hosting company should provide FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, MySQL and crontabs.

We will shortly be publishing a complete listing of web hosting services and other terms and definitions.

You can check what your host is offering against our list to determine that you have the scripts and services that you require.

Price

Price is always the factor people look at first, but it is far from the most important one.

These days good quality web hosting can be had relatively cheaply and the challenge becomes more about finding the most reliable service that fits for your needs and requirements.

Contracts and Hidden Fees

Ensure your web hosting company has no locked in contracts or cancellation fees and if they do, that you know exactly what they are.

If your web hosting company is providing a poor level of service, you want the freedom to change to another host without getting hit with a hefty cancellation penalty.

Money Back Guarantee

Some web hosting companies will provide a money back guarantee. This is a good sign as they are willing to back themselves in terms of level of service.

Setup Fees

Does your web host charge you a setup fee? If so ensure you take it into account. Ideally there should be no setup fees.

Payment Frequency

Most web hosts give you the option of electing to pay annually which gives you a cheaper rate than if you were to pay by the month.

If you are unsure about your host you might prefer to pay monthly until you are more certain of your host’s reliability and honesty. This way you’re not tied up with a bad host for the entire year.

Resellers

Not all hosting companies own or lease their own web servers, some are actually resellers for some other hosting company.

Are you buying through resellers? The trouble with some resellers is that you might be dealing with people who don’t know much about the system they’re pitching at you.

If they are ignorant of the ins and outs of the technology, they will take longer to resolve your problems as they have to go back and forth between the actual hosting company.

There are a number of good resellers however and some know what they’re doing and even offer web hosting a lot cheaper than the actual hosting company.

If you find out you are dealing with a reseller you will have to check out the reseller as well as the hosting company.

Location

You might want to choose a host with a local provider instead of some remote server elsewhere in the world. A local host offers the advantage that you are not far away if you ever have an issue to resolve with them.

On the other hand by broadening your options to include anywhere else in the world you stand a better chance to find a more competitive deal.

Most web hosting companies are capable of resolving issues remotely over the phone or over the internet. Depending where you live you might find a remote host has faster internet speed in the region where most of your visitors are present.

Final Tips

While reading web hosting reviews can be insightful, treat them with a healthy dose of skepticism. Many are affiliate sites and get a large commission for recommending the hosts that rank highest in their lists.

If you consider a wide enough pool of sources, visit enough forums, read enough information, you eventually learn to weed through the hype and get a better feel for what’s real and what’s not.

Give more weight to people’s personal recommendations and be wary of what people say in web hosting forums, as they might actually be affiliated with a web hosting company they’re promoting

Research your web hosting candidates directly, by going to the source, visit their forum to see if any issues and problems are coming up over and over.

When you sign up with a web hosting company, put them on a “probation period”. Give them a fixed amount of time to earn your trust and if you are not happy, cut them loose and find a better host.